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Monday, April 13, 2015

Bright Week - Continuing the Work of the Resurrection by Bringing New Life to the World: Two Kinds of Constitutions

The
united States
Constitution of 1787 is believed by many in the American Union to be based on
Christian principles. John Adams’s
quote, ‘Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of
any other’ (Wikiquote), is a favorite
proof text of theirs. To the extent that
the sinful tendencies of man are acknowledged in the provisions of this writ,
it is a true saying. But insofar as one
sin or a set of sins are pitted against other sins to bring about good for the
commonwealth by federal officials, it is in sooth no Christian document.

Þe
Holy Apostle teaches us, ‘Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good’
(Romans 12:21 KJV). But James Madison,
the father of the Constitution, gainsays him in Federalist No. 51: Let
‘ambition . . . counteract ambition’ (Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives, p. 85). That is, use evil to overcome evil.

By
thus bestirring a strong highmindedness within those in government, we see the
real quickening force behind the u. S. Constitution and other
charters like it: self-love. Yet Christians are taught over and over again
to reject self-love. St Maximus the Confessor
(+662) names it as the ‘mother of all vices’ (Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos, p. 95). Thunberg
continues, new-wording St Maximus, ‘The life of vice is characterized by a
continual disintegration . . . philautía
[i.e., self-love--W.G.] generates a multitude of passions . . . and thus
dividing the unity of human nature into thousands of fragments. . . . The vices cause these divisions . . .
also between him and his neighbors, since all men participate in the same
nature and are called to a unity guided by this principle and aim’ (p. 95).

Simple
disagreements among men are not the only fruits of these divisions. St Maximus teaches further, says Thunberg,
that by embracing self-love, which necessarily involves a flight from God, man
will raise a ‘tyranny against his neighbor’ (pgs. 56-8). Thus, the very thing the u. S.
Constitution was written to guard against is its natural outcome because of its
unchristian handling of man’s passions.

Self-interest,
which is another name for self-love, the guiding moral principle in Western
governlore and geldlore since the days of feudalism, therefore, cannot be the
foundation for a folk or their government.
For self-interest and the vices springing from it yield only
disintegration and destruction, not better union, peace, justice, and all the
other goals of the u. S.
Constitution’s Preamble or of any other virtuous people.

This
is one kind of constitution, the constitution founded on self-love, and it is
not Christian. The second kind, the
truly Christian constitution, is one founded on love. ‘It is impossible to build a life based on
wickedness and hatred, for they are the principles of destruction,’ Archbishop
Averky Taushev (+1976) says. ‘ . . .
love is the only creative force in life; it is the source, the root, the
well-spring of all creation. The only
reason for the creation of the world and man by God the Creator is His love . .
. . This love ennobles our entire life;
it creates and inspires all that is truly great, truly beautiful. Family life, society, and government are
grounded in this love. In short, love is
the vivifying, fundamental life-giver of the world. This is fully logical, for love is from God,
and God Himself is love’ (Struggle for
Virtue, pgs. 32-3). ‘This mutual
love [among Christians--W.G.] is a distinguishing characteristic of
Christianity. Therefore, where there is
no love, there is no Christianity’ (p. 32).

This
is quite an upbraiding in itself, but Archbishop Averky shows further the
incompatibility between Western, Madisonian constitutions that kindle the fires
of self-love in man (which he names ‘egoism’ below) and Christianity: ‘The teachings of Christ are all directed
against egoism. The task of the
Christian faith is to destroy all manifestations of egoism in a person, and
thus to eradicate egoism itself, and in its stead to implant true spiritual
Gospel love which excludes any egoism’ (pgs. 56-7).

Rather
than breaking apart, love upbuilds.
Thunberg writes, ‘Maximus . . . stress[es] the unifying function of
charity itself’ (Man and the Cosmos, p.
96). St Maximus says in Centuries on Charity IV:37, ‘Be no
self-pleaser and you will not hate your brother; be no self-lover and you will
love God’ (Man and the Cosmos, p. 96)

Therefore,
instead of relying on an elaborate system of checks and balances as in Western
constitutions of distrust to bring about justice for the people in a
commonwealth and their various interests (i.e., allowing each to have what is
due him), love is the guardian against injustice. St Maximus teaches, quoth Thunberg, ‘God is
by nature good and detached, and He manifests these two attributes in loving
all men alike.’ Man, when he is free
from self-love and its attendant vices, also loves all oðer men alike,
manifests perfect ‘balance and equilibrium’ in all his actions toward others
(pgs. 99-100, quotes at 99).

The
proper bulwark for protecting against favoritism and other governmental abuses
is thus an inward virtue, residing in man’s ghost, and not an outward arrangement
of counterbalancing branches and levels of government.

It
is for such reasons that governments in Orthodox Christian countries are less
sharply defined than those in the post-Schism, Protestant and Catholic West -
often mirroring the family, with elders and a father-king in places of
authority. For in the West outward,
neatly arranged, overly rational systems have taken the place of the fulness of
the inner life of the Kingdom
of God bestowed by the
Holy Ghost, which the Western nations lost when they sundered themselves from
the Orthodox Church. This should not take
anyone aback, for where the Holy Ghost dwelleth, there love and all the other
virtues abound, and the law of man and his cleverness and his jinnies and
pulleys and chains and levers to forhold man’s use of power are not needed
(Rom. 14:17, II Cor. 3:17, Gal. 5:22-3).

Þe
South, as she often does, finds herself in tension between the errors of the
schismatic West and þe truth of the Orthodox Church: on the one hand, very often overthoughtsome
toward outward arrangements of government power (Calhoon, p. 192), that is,
leaning toward mistrust, and on the other, always retaining and stressing the
need for a familial tone and structure among her folk as a whole (pgs. 193-4), which implies the Christian virtues of love and
trust.

There
are then two choices for the South. She
may follow the unchristian, Western tradition and have a constitution of
mistrust which leads to division and strife:
‘free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence’
(Jefferson, ‘Kentucky Resolutions’). Or
she may follow the Orthodox Tradition and have a constitution based on trust,
which brings about wholeness. For trust,
Father Pavel Florensky tells us, gives birth to faith (Hosking, ‘Foreward’, in
Pyman, Pavel Florensky, p. xvii), the
prerequisite to love.

‘Tertium non datur! [There is no third option.],’ cries
Archbishop Averky. ‘Either life will be
renewed by Gospel love or we will see the catastrophic ruin of humanity to
which its ever-increasing malignity and hatred are leading it’ (Struggle for Virtue, p. 54). American constitutional theory is powerless
to stop that descent and will only hasten it, for it seeks the cure for
sinfulness by increasing self-love, the very cause of sin itself. Let St Maximus the Confessor warn us once
more about using ‘vice to counteract vice’, about stirring up self-love, if we
would see good days for ourselves and our afterkin:

Thus the immense and innumerable host of passions
invades men’s life. Their life becomes
in this way deplorable. For the human beings honor the very cause of
the destruction of their existence and pursue themselves, without knowing it,
the cause of their corruption. The
unity of human nature falls into a thousand pieces, and human beings, like
beasts, devour their own nature. In
fact, in trying to obtain pleasure and avoid pain, instigated by self-love, man
invents multiple and innumerable forms of corrupted passions. If, for example, on account of pleasure, one
cultivates self-love, one awakes in oneself . . . pride, vanity, self-conceit,
. . . TYRANNY . . . (Thunberg, p. 58, all emphasis added).

Works Cited

Adams, John.
‘Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of
the Militia of Massachusetts’.
Wikiquote. Posted 8 April 2015. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Adams. Accessed 13 April 2015.